This was unquestionably the
best all-round performance I have yet seen from Opera Holland Park, staging and
musical performances alike often putting august metropolitan houses from around
the world to shame. Where musical direction has sometimes proved variable, in
Alexander Polianichko, OHP had recruited a fine Tchaikovsky conductor. (His
reading of Cherevichki at the Royal
Opera House was the first time I encountered his work.) Polianichko clearly
felt at ease with the score and communicated that ease freely. Tempi and
transitions were all well handled, nothing especially drawing attention to
itself, the drama progressing ‘naturally’ from the musical ebb and flow –
though, as we all know, it takes a great deal of art to conceal art. This might
not have been the searing drama I heard Daniel
Barenboim bring to Tchaikovsky’s opera in Berlin, but it served the work
very well. It would be vain to suggest that the City of London Sinfonia would
not have benefited from a greater number of strings – and there was room in the
pit – but a chamber-orchestral performance worked far better than I had
expected, noticeably better, indeed, than it had for Mozart or Beethoven, which
suggests that the conductor and the performers on the night were at least as
important as actual numbers. Certainly
the strings played with cultivation and commitment. If they were sometimes
overshadowed by some ravishing woodwind playing, the problem of balancing was not
their fault.

Daniel Slater’s production
was manifestly superior in every respect to the lifeless,
Made-for-the-Met offering Deborah Warner foisted upon the Coliseum earlier
this season. It will be interesting to see how Slater’s staging compares with
the new production Kasper Holten is preparing for Covent Garden, since during a
couple of conversations I had with Holten earlier this year, he mentioned the
importance of memory to his conception of the work. (I think I can give that
away at least, since it is not really giving anything away!) That certainly shine
through in Slater’s understanding too, Onegin a ghostly, dream-like figure
often watching when he was not participating. Leslie Travers’s set – which might,
and I mean this as a compliment – work equally well for an intelligent
production of Der Rosenkavalier,
evoke faded grandeur, the end of a line, aristocratic furniture upended,
reminding us that Onegin was an outsider both chronologically as well as
temperamentally. The third act, five years later, is set during the early years
of the Revolution, the Polonaise treated as an opportunity for temporal
relocation, young Soviet soldiers rearranging the stage, laying out a red carpet for (General?) Gremin and his
well-connected wife, and, most touchingly, the nurse Filipievna snuffing out
the candles from the Larinas’ chandelier. It rises again, in fine post-revolutionary
fettle, seemingly powered by newer, electric means, putting one inevitably in
mind of Lenin’s equation of communism as Soviet power plus electrification of
the whole country. I wondered at first how the new, Leninist setting would
benefit the work, but was entirely won over, for the point was not so much the
Leninist setting – though might that not also be an interesting idea: Onegin as
Bolshevik, soon disaffected? – as the passing of time. There is nothing wrong,
of course, with that being expressed as originally envisaged, but Tsarist St
Petersburg is not in itself the point any more than Leningrad might be.

Books play an important role
too. When we meet Tatiana, she is very much engrossed in her book (Richardson,
presumably), something of a plain-Jane in contrast to the flightier Olga. Her
mother, of course, counsels her – whether it be wisely is another matter – that
she had to grow out of the fictions her youthful reading engendered, in order
to live in the real world. The replacement of the Larinas’ library by an
all-red set of books – suggesting, perhaps, a Progress Publishers’ collected
edition, even though that fabled firm would not be founded until 1931? – again provides
an excellent visual shorthand for the changed circumstances of the third act.
Tatiana’s frustration is powerfully represented by her sweeping those books
from the shelves.

In many respects, I felt that
Slater’s staging brought Tchaikovsky’s opera, or at least its central
character, closer to Pushkin’s ‘original’ than is usually the case. For not
only is Onegin an outsider, he is filled with restlessness, and one has a very
clear sense of him journeying from one scene to the next, much as in Pushkin’s
lyric narrative. There is one loss here – though this is far from confined to
this particular staging – in that there is relatively little room for
Tchaikovsky’s homoeroticism, intentional or otherwise. Still, no staging of an
interesting work will be able to deal with every concrete aspect, let alone
with every dramatic possibility. This was the only staging I can recall seeing
in the theatre to compare with
Steven Pimlott’s bizarrely underrated production for the Royal Opera.

Mark Stone presented an
Onegin handsome of tone as well as presence, aloof, restless, tormented without
the slightest hint of exaggeration. Anna Leese was an excellent foil as
Tatiana, her portrayal as intelligent, as dramatically progressive, as it was moving.
Hannah Pedley’s Olga was pleasingly rich-toned, without detriment to her
relative flightiness as a character (especially in this production). Whilst
Peter Auty’s Lensky was well received, I found his performance and Patrick
Mundy’s Triquet the only real disappointments in the cast, both somewhat coarse
of timbre, the former in particular often sounding as if he would be happier
singing Puccini. Otherwise, there was much to enjoy in the finely etched Mme
Larina and Filipievna of Anne Mason and Elizabeth Sikora respectively, and in
the less-geriatricly-portrayed-than-usual Gremin of Graeme Broadbent. The
choral singing was excellent, an ideal match of clarity and weight, testament
surely to excellent training from chorus master, Kelvin Lim. A memorable
evening indeed.